BLOG TO GRAFFITI STREET ART

BLOG T.O. PORTRAITS: Mike Parsons

BLOG TO Portraits: We're well into December now, which means
winter is upon us, and Mike Parsons is still spilling black
ink all over Queen Street,
busily crankin'-out awesome drawings for all your holiday art needs.

Likely, if you've strolled along Queen Street West,
east of Spadina Ave.
near Lush, you've seen Mike--a pioneer of Toronto's street
art-vending scene--laboring over huge canvases with brushes and buckets of
ink, often to crowds of people who swarm to see the artist in action.

His prolific body of work--an astonishing
collection of drawings, comic books, animations and massive murals--spans six
years of hardcore determination. And when I say hardcore, I mean HARD CORE.
This guy's a drawing machine. Aside from eating, sleeping and
guzzling coffee to stay awake, he does nothing but DRAW. That's how
he makes his living: by turning-out drawings night and day for the
more-than-affordable-art market.

Since 2000, when his ink-bespattered
journey began, Mike has made the cover of NOW Magazine Toronto; he's
garnered several solo exhibitions, including a retrospective (something usually
reserved for more senior, "established" artists); he's received
numerous mural-commissions throughout the city; quite a few people collect his
work; and he maintains a private studio, which is managed by his friend and
official representative, Ashley Proctor, owner of Creative Blueprint (Arts
Management Services).

Although Mike loves the street, drawing for
the public and seeing first-hand how they respond to his work, it limits the
size and quality of his work. Really, says Mike, he wants to spend less time on
the street and more time in his studio creating cleaner, more detailed, more
commercially viable drawings. Doing so would greatly increase his chances of
getting gallery exhibitions--where he could demand higher prices for
his work--which would likely make life a little easier for Mike. But here's the
catch: if he leaves the street, he can't afford his studio (where he lives and
stores the bulk of his work).

In light of this, I ask myself: if you take Mike
out of the street, do you take the street out of Mike? Perhaps a
better question is, if Mike leaves the street for the studio, is Mike
still a street artist? I mean, Mike is the street; and the street is Mike; the
two are synonymous. Perhaps the street is merely a phase of Mike's career, and
he's destined to become something else entirely. Food for thought (and perhaps
for a follow-up Blog TO article).